Part-Time Educator: A Wild Ride

It's been a long time since I've written a new blog post... Nearly a year, to be precise. That's pretty pathetic and lame, even by super-lame-blog-standards. For this, I sincerely apologize. I'll be striving to get some more blog action going presently.

Why now, you ask? You've been patiently waiting all this time... Checking this site twice daily to see if there were any new tantalizingly awesomely entertaining posts about some form of geekery or another... And finally, a new nugget is posted, and it's starting out just as boring as all the other nuggets previously posted. "WTF????" I hear you screaming all the way from where I sit typing this... Before it's even posted... Which is kind of an amazing accomplishment, so I guess I've got that going for me. Which is nice.

I've actually got an excellent excuse for not posting anything over the past 5 months. The other 7 before that, well, I've got no excuse whatsoever. Let's focus on just the recent past to avoid saying things like "lazy" or "irresponsible" or "just a jerk". I did something insane:  I took on a part-time teaching gig over at CSU San Marcos, torturing students in an upper-division elective, "CS 481:  Intro to Mobile Programming". What I have discovered is that I would need to be one of those folks who needs only a couple hours of sleep each night to survive. I did not get to put in as much time as I would have liked into making the class awesome, while at the same time I also did not get to put as much time into my "day job" as I would have liked to make my work more awesome, while at the same exact time I also did not get to put as much time into my family to make all of us more awesome. I was spread thinner than... I don't even know. Something so thin it would be all but completely transparent. It might even start to develop holes. If I was the peanut butter on a PB&J sandwich, you would simply think someone forgot the damn peanut butter, and you'd probably be severely disappointed.

​My students, my co-workers, and my family all have every right to be seriously disappointed in my performance over the past 5 months. So... More apologies and all that stuff, and I promise that I have learned my lesson about biting off (much) more than I can chew.

But now a new day is dawning... I have completely finished up the class, and although I absolutely loved teaching it, I've decided to put off any future teaching gigs until some future day when I'm no longer working full time. I will be submitting the final grades today, and that will be that for the class. It was a long-term dream of mine to teach at the college level, and I'm so glad I did it. It truly was fantastic, humbling, and super-motivating all at once. 

Stay tuned, mythical reader of this blog... I've got a bunch of Xamarin.Forms stuff I plan to start talking about on this blog. More to come soon!